3.3 Brought with it some significant changes to trapping in general, and fire trap in particular. Most impactful among them, for fire trap at least, was the addition of a 200% effectiveness to added damage being tagged onto the skill gem. This allows fire trap to easily take advantage of any source of added damage, with elemental damage being one of the easiest ones to scale - hence the name of the build. Essentially, all this build aimed to do was find the most effective way to squeeze absolute tons of flat damage into fire trap while maintaining good survivability, decent clear, and snowballing single-target damage to an absurd degree.
Hiya, my name is Octavian, and this is probably my best build yet. At least, objectively. This character can handle all content in the game, from hillock up to uber elder, and can be started on a budget and scaled almost limitlessly. In fact, I began with this build as my league starter this league, so I can say from experience that it can be started out on literally nothing. As I said earlier, the build is built basically out of the stupidly high damage effectiveness of fire trap, and as such is based around this item -

Malachai's Awakening, which gives up to an average of 250 flat damage to spells. The usual downside of being forced into blood magic is actually even an upside with this build, as the flat damage it provides far outpaces that any aura could give us, and the blood magic means we can print traps with impunity, effectively avoiding all mana problems usually associated with the archetype.

This then pairs beautifully with all sorts of source of elemental penetration, such as wise oak, shroud of the lightless, and the all pen from the saboteur and pathfinder sub-ascendancies. The final product is a build that shreds shaper, uber atziri, chayula, and even uber elder phases in seconds. Even Hall of Grandmasters poses little challenge, because the burst is so high that most builds just fall over - and the ones that don't end up being easy prey for a balefire swap.

Lets get into Itemisation first, since that really is the most core factor to this build.

Spoiler

For each gear slot here, I will be giving endgame goals, and recommendations for budget and/or leveling items. This will be in the place of a segment of the guide purely devoted to leveling. Let me know if you prefer this formatting or my usual of setting aside an entire segment for leveling instead.

We'll start with the helmet slot, since the most core piece of gear to the build is the one already mentioned - Malachai's Awakening. This helmet is obtained through the use of the Nightmare Awakens prophecy and a Malachai's Simula. You need only to have the prophecy in your wheel and the simula in your inventory when you kill core Malachai in order for the transformation to take place, it does not need to be equipped. This helmet essentially *is* the build, at least when paired with shroud of the lightless, and should be your first goal to reach for in terms of gear. Until you can afford either the mask itself or the prophecy to generate it, use a Hrimnor's Resolve in it's place. Before you have the Awakening, Hrimnors' fire damage scaling is more relevant, as much more of your damage will be fire-based, and it also is only 1 alch for freeze immunity, damage, and res.

The second most important piece of gear to the build I've already mentioned once or twice. This is the Shroud of the Lightless, the unique chestpiece added in abyss league which offers level 20 elemental penetration to socketed gems. This chestpiece is not replaceable, as the all-penetration is incredibly valuable to scaling single-target in a build that does all 3 elemental damage types. I often get asked if belly or loreweave would be better due to the six link, however, the built in support means a 5-linked shroud *is* a six linked item, effectively. Also, one that costs a lot less to link. Do not use any other chestpiece in the endgame, it will be strictly worse. Until you can afford a shroud, a rare corrupted 6-link with decent stats and the right colors is a great relatively cheap option, and even a tabula with +2 AOE, fire, trap or duration gems works great too.

The next most important unique in the build is a flask - The Wise Oak. Again, following the theme of all-penetration being key, wise oak is a natural choice for this build. This does, however, necessitate the balancing of all three elemental resistances, which can be a chore. Trust me though - it is well worth it. A triple balanced wise oak will be a significant damage upgrade for the build, while at the same time being a huge defensive boon. Use any decent utility flask, such as a sulphur or stibnite, until you can afford this. The real cost of the wise oak will come in the effort of balancing it, however.

Moving on to the boot slot, this build makes use of a pair of two-socket Bubonic Trails, which provide life, movement speed, and most importantly abyssal sockets. A single-socket pair is a great budget option, as it will still provide plenty of power to the build until you can afford the upgraded version.

For your gloves, you're going to want shaper-touched gloves with "skills which throw traps throw one additional trap". These gloves are best in slot for basically any trapper build, as the amount of power provided by this affix in terms of clear and single-target is almost unrivaled. Look also for whatever res you need to balance wise oak, and as much life as you can muster. Until you can afford these, simply use regular ol' rare gloves with life and res. However, this mod is fairly easy to self-roll with alts, and bases are fairly cheap this far into the league.

The final unique in the build is in the shield slot. I use an Ahn's Heritage, which overtakes Saffel's Frame for this slot due to the roughly 100 life you can get out of it being more valuable to me than an additional point of max res. However, Saffel's is also an option. Both of these shields are very cheap, and either one is great for the build, so feel free to pick whichever suits you. I do not use two fragilities to activate the onslaught portion of this shield, as it is not worth the jewel sockets in a build that can get so much value out of abyssal jewels. There is no budget option here, since ahn's is cheap as dirt already.

For your weapon, a plethora of options exist. Temple-modded daggers and sceptres can be great cheap options with the hybrid spell damage and non-chaos gained as chaos effect being very powerful. Shaper touched variants with elemental gained as chaos or damage penetrates elemental resistances are also quite strong, though very pricey to purchase or craft. The most important roll, however, is always going to be attack speed. This build does buckets of damage almost regardless, provided your other gear is solid, so getting a lot of attack speed on your weapon to ensure shield charge is smooth is very important. Do not be duped into using something seemingly high damage without any attack speed, or even worse - a wand, which denies you shield charge. I am often asked if shimmeron would be a good fit, and while the damage would undoubtedly be absurd, this build does enough damage with almost any weapon equipped to murder shaper in seconds. You do not need more damage - you need more movespeed to get from pack to pack and boss to boss faster. After a certain point, dps becomes irrelevant. The difference between 3 million and 4 million shaper dps is impossible to notice ingame under pretty much any reasonable circumstance, so it is better to scale quality of life factors that improve the playstyle of the build.

That said, the next most important rolls on the dagger/sceptre will be spell crit, crit multi, and spell damage. That is in addition to the shaper and temple mods listed earlier. This is my dagger for comparison -

A brightbeak can actually work as a solid starter weapon, since damage will probably be good enough that simply faster charging about will be desirable for early maps. However, an acceptable dagger with a bit of spell damage, crit, and good attack speed shouldn't be that expensive. Keep a livesearch up for upgrades and try to snag one a bit cheaper that way. Outside of the brightbeak, Axiom Perpetuums can also be used for very early leveling, as they will provide quite a lot of power early on.

Moving to the jewellery, it is fairly basic. This is where most of the work gets done for the build in terms of resistances, and as such they are simply rares with good res rolls, life, and probably resistance implicits for ease of balancing wise oak. Aim for crit related rolls on the amulet as well, if you can, and you will likely need a strength roll somewhere in order to equip ahn's heritage if you're going with that over saffel's. These are my rings and amulet -

Some chaos resistance is pretty important this league in particular, as many Incursion mobs are pretty nasty in terms of chaos damage.

I did actually miss one unique earlier which is fairly important - get yourself a hair trigger early on in the leveling process, as it will be a pretty massive boon to the build. Aim to get one with the highest trap trigger aoe roll that you can find for the cheapest.

Finally, the belt slot. This is also pretty basic, with a simple life, res, chaos res stygian vise being the best option. This affords us another abyssal socket, which is quite important.

Speaking of abyssal sockets - this build currently makes use of 7 abyssal jewels, which are where the build has the most room to scale. To reach truly outstanding levels of damage with fire trap, getting some really nasty abyssal jewels is a necessity. However, they are not strictly necessary simply to *do* all content, and really just allow you to take the build to ridiculous levels if you are so inclined. I've put together a livesearch for poe.trade (http://poe.trade/search/hausaritoyokoh/live) which should be a good baseline to help you find some jewels that are acceptable for the build, I would suggest leaving it running until some pop up with some decent life, or quite a lot of damage. I will also link a few of my own jewels as examples of endgame goals to shoot for -

Flat elemental damage rolls to spells are the most important thing to shoot for on these. However, life, crit chance, crit multi, and pen if you haven't killed recentl are all quite good rolls. Even a bit of res to help balance wise oak is acceptable.

Lastly, my flask setup outside of wise oak consists of one life flask (with a bubbling roll), one quicksilver of warding to deal with curse maps, a basalt, and a diamond flask.

With itemisation covered, lets move on to the passive tree.

Spoiler

I've drawn up two different versions of the passive tree in Path of Building, alongside some basic gear for different budgetary limitations. One thing I would like to get out of the way though - Scion is not well-positioned on the tree to obtain trap-focused nodes immediately out the gate. There are more than enough points available in a finalized or even near-finalized tree to reach them, but the build undeniably has a slump in terms of power around act 6-8. Powerful leveling gear, such as a tabula, sacrificial heart, and axiom perpetuums are quite helpful for getting past this, but it is undeniably there. That said, this first tree is drafted for a version of the build just coming into it's own in the endgame, pushing perhaps yellow or early red maps. This is what you should be shooting for on an early budget -

This version includes Malachai's already, as this is assumed to be your first goal. However, if you are unable to afford this, simply use Anger and Hrimnor's Resolve in it's place.

The second version of the tree is essentially my character as she currently stands, with some quite powerful endgame gear. This is meant to give you an idea of what you should be aiming for in each gearslot, as well as where any errant points past level 90 should go.

Cluster Traps is core to any trap build, multiplying traps thrown to scale both clear and single-target quite effectively. Charged traps is used as a hybrid of damage and QOL in one slot, giving us some trap throwing speed as well as multi. The other gems are simply big more multipliers. If you'd like to shatter with fire trap, which is just a fun image, you can use Increased Crit damage or strikes instead of ele focus.

For mobility, we use a shield charge, linked like so -

Fortify is good. Charging faster, also good. The culling strike should always be 20% quality in order to charge faster even faster.

The build uses a cast when damage taken linked to both enfeeble and immortal call. This causes them to rotate on procs, which is a bit inefficient, but due to the two-socket bubonics, I am a bit too strapped to use 2 CWDT setups.

For a bit of extra single-target, flamethrower traps are quite powerful. These can also be used during abysses, breaches, or before setting up strongboxes in order to deal with passively spawning mobs and/or stream of monsters. The links are as follows -

These links are set up to purely output as much burst as possible during the duration, rather than to scale cooldown reduction or duration. This is because oftentimes the boss and/or anything else is dead before the traps despawn anyways.

The final 2-link is a vaal righteous fire linked to increased duration. We do *not* use the regular active version of righteous fire, as this would kill us. Instead, this is simply a seventh link worth of spell damage on a button, with the one-time cost of 30% of your HP being very easy for this build to recover quickly.

If you'd like to use a golem, I suggest a Chaos Golem, as it would help cover over the issue with physical damage the build can sometimes have.

That about covers it! Lastly, before we part ways - Alira for your bandit choice, and Brine King / Shakari for pantheon powers. Or rather, whatever pantheons you want, but if you want to use the ones I choose, go for brine king and shakari. Pantheons are very easily changed around, so play around and see which you think are best for the situation. Just be wary of stuns if you switch off of brine king.

Thanks for reading through all this way! I hope you enjoy the build if you do end up playing it, and if you make any changes anywhere along the line do let me know! I love hearing what people do jumping off of my builds. If you'd like to see the build in action, you can always find me on twitch under the name Octavian0, where I stream daily at 1 pm EST. Thanks again!

The benefit of the max res provided by ahn's shield is too beneficial than the dps provided by martyr's. The dps is already scaling a lot because of the fire trap damage effectiveness. You might want to try but its overkill. Trust me.

Also if you are on a budget for the jewels before I had my last abyss socket filled I used a Healthy Mind. Due to having 0/0 mana is the same as having no mana reserved you get the (40-60%) increased damage for free. Just a tip for anyone having problems getting money for jewels ;)

8 chains arc is hitting first target for about 198% dmg effectivness due to % more for each remmaining chain so its close to dmg of fire trap with much better aoe coverage. Ofc my math might be wrong. But if you drop ele focus for trap support gem and switch to arc, which could shock dmg might be simmilar or even more. If Im wrong please correct me.

In all the years I have played I never played traps but think I will try this. Quick question, do we level with fire trap from the start? Sorry, not very familiar with spell based builds as I am usually a slave to beefy boi melee builds.

In all the years I have played I never played traps but think I will try this. Quick question, do we level with fire trap from the start? Sorry, not very familiar with spell based builds as I am usually a slave to beefy boi melee builds.

yes i started with Explosive Trap which we get form act 1 then switch to fire trap after lvl 12

In all the years I have played I never played traps but think I will try this. Quick question, do we level with fire trap from the start? Sorry, not very familiar with spell based builds as I am usually a slave to beefy boi melee builds.

yes i started with Explosive Trap which we get form act 1 then switch to fire trap after lvl 12

I'm actually using both fire trap and arc/vaal arc at the same time. Definitely speeds up the process.